He didn’t want to risk being seen, so he went for the window. He tossed the rucksack outside and followed it. He set off in the direction of Ridley Road Market, and there, accosted by a thousand and one rank odours from various types of meat and fish, he scooted behind the stalls on the opposite side of the street from the butcher shop. He caught a glimpse of his father going at an enormous disemboweled pig inside the shop as one of the apprentice butchers watched and another did a typically bad job of keeping the flies off a pile of sheep’s legs and another of organ meats soaking up the sun.

  Tani knew of Simisola’s various haunts, so he found her easily enough in a large room above the party shop Cake Decorating by Masha operated from this location. When Tani walked in, he saw that cleaning up after the most recent class was giving way to setting up for the evening class. Simi was at the washing-up sink. To her right, colourful mixing bowls joined a number of baking tins on a drying mat. Inside the bowls were measuring spoons and measuring cups in multiple sets. Beaters from the electric mixers still displayed the colours chosen for their concoctions by Masha’s eager students.

  The centrepiece of the room was a long, chipped green table, its surface speckled with the remains of various doughs and icings. Masha was walking along the table, spraying it with some kind of cleaner. She wiped up as she went, after which she headed towards what appeared to be a storeroom. When she emerged, she had numerous spices and such held in the clasped, curved lap of her apron. She clocked Tani and said, “ ’Fraid there’s not another class till half past seven and it’s filled. You have to wait till next week.”

  “Come for Simisola,” he said.

  Hearing his voice, Simi swung around. “Tani! Are you walking home with me?” She looked delighted.

  “Yeah,” he said, because they would indeed be walking together, although their destination wasn’t going to be Bronte House.

  “I got to finish up first,” she said. “But you’ll wait, won’t you? Won’t you wait till I’m done?”

  He looked at the wall clock. He reckoned that she wouldn’t be missed for hours and neither would he. His father would know he hadn’t been at work, but that was of no matter since he—Tani—had been burning bridges in that regard as quickly as he came upon them. But, still, he and Simi needed to move with speed in order to get her to the Franklins’ house.

  “Hey,” he said to her, “Sophie wants to meet you, Squeak. And she wants you to come with me to her sister’s birthday celebration.”

  “Oh, I love birthdays, Tani. Will there be cake? When is it?”

  “Tonight. I came to take you over there.”

  “Tonight? Oh no! I can’t go tonight. Mum and I ’re going to do sketches for my celebration cake. An’ Masha’s going to make it. ’Member? I told you. It’ll have special decorating on it. We’ll have it for after the initiation.”

  “Yeah. We need to talk about that as well, Squeak.”

  “Why?”

  “We just do. Let’s finish up and get out of here.”

  She was intrigued enough, he saw, that she picked up the pace, and within twenty minutes she had her bit of earned cash from Masha, and they were back in the market. He needed to keep Simi out of sight of their father’s butcher shop and fishmonger stall, as well as Into Africa. So they kept close to the shops abutting Masha’s and the party store beneath it, and they emerged at the market’s far end. There, he bought a small order of chips and a Coke for Simi. He bought only a Coke for himself. These they took farther along Ridley Road to where the market ended and a dusty-leafed beech tree provided shade. There was no bench, just the tree itself. They leaned against its trunk.

  His sister politely offered him a chip, which Tani took. He chewed it thoughtfully and watched her do the same. He opened both of the Cokes and handed her one of them.

  He said, “It’s dead important that you go to Sophie’s, Squeak. The Franklins? Like I said, they want you to come.”

  “But Mummy and I—”

  “Squeak, listen.” He drank down some Coke as if it were something that could bolster his courage. “There i’n’t any initiation. There never was. Mum means something totally different, but she’s calling it an initiation because she thinks you’ll go for it if you don’t know what’s really meant to happen.”

  Simi was chewing slowly, and she turned to look at him, round-eyed. She said, “Mummy said . . .”

  “Yeah. I know. But she said it to trick you, so you’d think it was part of being in a tribe. But you’re already Yoruba, Squeak. You’re born Yoruba. There’s not an initiation, and there never was.”

  “There is,” she said. “I told you, Tani. I went to the place where I’m gonna get initiated. Mummy took me there. I met a lady, Easter. She said she would give me a jab and that would make me initiated.”

  Tani tried to decide what to tell her without destroying the world she shared with their mother. He said, “It’s this, Squeak. Mum doesn’t want you to know it all because she doesn’t want you to be scared. But what they want to do to you is what some of the tribes do to girls in Nigeria. An’ other places ’s well.”

  She looked at her dusty feet in her dusty sandals. Then she looked at him. She said, “But what they do is jus’ to initiate them, Tani.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not, Squeak.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Tani looked away from her for a moment. He needed a woman to explain this to her and he realised he should have found one to do it. Sophie would have, but it would have had a bloody sight more power if the explanation came from someone who’d been cut. He looked back at his sister and tried to give her details. “They muck girls up is what they do. They muck girls up between their legs. It’s real bad, Squeak. It happened to Mum and now she wants it to happen to you. Cos it’s like this mad tradition they got some places in Nigeria. And tha’s why you got to come with me to Sophie’s now. Because if I don’t get you out of there, they’re going to muck you up between the legs ’s well. Squeak, you’d know all about this if Mum had let you go to school. Didn’t you ever wonder why you got taught by Mum at home? It’s cos at school they teach about this an’ all sorts of other things. You c’n ask Sophie. She knows all about it. She doesn’t have to worry whether it will happen to her because she’s English. But you and me, we’re Nigerian, and—”

  “What about my celebration?” she asked, her voice rising, her eyes growing bright with tears. “Lots of people’re coming, Tani. Even our cousins will come from Peckham. Everyone’s giving me presents and eating cake and—” The first of her tears began to drip down her cheeks. Her lower lip was trembling and Tani felt struck. His stomach was turning into liquid.

  He said, “Mum’s not lying about that part. There’d still be that: the cake and presents and the rest. Only . . .” Shit, he thought. She was only eight bloody years old. She was ages away from understanding the significance of the plan to cut her: what it would do to her now, what it would do to her later, and what it could do to her if things went south. Even he wasn’t clear on all that. But Sophie’s reaction to the Nigerian cutter coming to Bronte House had lit a fire that he wasn’t going to allow anyone to douse.

  He said, “I bet no one’s told you the truth about Lim, right?”

  “Lim’s with her gran, Tani. She’s having a holiday for th’ summer. She’s coming home in—”

  “She won’t be coming home,” he said.

  “Why?

  “Because she’s dead.”

  Simi’s eyes grew enormous. She shook her head. “She’s with her gran. That’s what Mummy said. She’ll be back for school. I don’t know where her gran lives, ’xactly, but she’ll be back for school. Mum said.”

  He touched her cheek, wiping the tears away with his thumb. He said, “She killed herself, Squeak. She was ‘initiated,’ if that’s what you want to call it, just like it’s meant to happen to you. But it went bad, really and truly bad, and it stayed that way, and she couldn’t cope. So she unwound one of her mum’s head wraps and she used it to hang herself.”

  Twelve years old she’d been, Tani thought. Simisola’s friend and idol from Mayville Estate. With an infection attacking her rampantly till she couldn’t endure the pain another moment, till death seemed the better alternative than to go on in a life that had been destroyed in the name of purity, in the name of chastity, in the name of bloody-hell-who-knew-what?

  Simi said, “She didn’t! She didn’t! Mummy said—”

  “Listen to me. Mum lied to you. About Lim, about this initiation rubbish, about everything. Squeak, you got to come with me. Pa invited a Nigerian woman to come to the flat. She’s meant to cut you. Mum wasn’t there when he arranged it, and he didn’t know I was there. He reckons he can plan the whole thing and no one will know till the cutter shows up. He’ll make it for when I’m not there. He’ll make it for when Mum’s not there. There’ll be some women to hold you down and—”

  “No!” she shrieked. “No! No!”

  She threw the chips to the ground and the Coke as well. Before he could stop her she began to run, straight through the market with no mind as to crashing into anyone who stood in her way.

  BELSIZE PARK

  NORTH LONDON

  It was late when Lynley arrived in Belsize Park. He’d rung Daidre earlier, settling for voice mail instead of the real person. Coming at this hour was, thus, something of a risk. But they hadn’t spoken since their unhappy conversation about fear and whatever-else-it-had-been-about, and he didn’t like feeling unsettled about her, about who they were to each other, or about where they were heading. At this moment, though, it was only the end to their previous conversation that he wanted to do something about, although, truth to tell, he wasn’t at all sure what he could do about it other than say sorry. For his part. Which, of course, had been to bring up the topic in the first place, taking her words about her brother and sister and turning them on her in a fashion about which he wasn’t proud.

  His final meeting of the day with Havers and Nkata had gone on longer than he’d anticipated. Both of them had reports for him, and all of them wished to sort through what they’d uncovered in order to make sense of it.

  The missing smartphone meant one of several things: that someone had gone to Teo Bontempi’s flat to do away with the mobile once she had gone into hospital—knowing the mobile contained some sort of incriminating evidence—or Ross Carver was lying about the smartphone being there on her bedside table when he’d spent the night, or Mark Phinney had grabbed it when he found her unconscious in her bed. The first option suggested that whoever had struck the detective sergeant had returned later for the phone, although it begged the question why the killer had not removed the phone from the premises immediately the blow had been struck. The second option suggested that Teo Bontempi’s estranged husband had something to fear from what the phone might reveal about him. And the third option was that Mark Phinney had wanted to investigate what was on that phone. There was, of course, a fourth possibility: Someone else had removed the smartphone from Teo’s flat for reasons they’d yet to uncover.

  According to Barbara Havers, she’d had a look at the dead woman’s appointment diary taken from her flat. The word evaluation was written in it on July 24, and that wanted clarification. The fact that the word appeared by itself with only the hour of the day indicating when she was to have or do the evaluation suggested that it was for something in a location with which she was familiar. That, in turn, suggested Empress State Building, especially since her transfer to another job occurred almost immediately afterwards.

  Nkata brought up his morning’s encounter with Teo’s sister. Nothing about it seemed right to him. She didn’t sit well, was how he put it. He explained the source of the row between Rosie and Teo: Teo’s infrequent calls upon their father as he was rehabilitating after a stroke. That didn’t quite smell like it should since Teo’s mother had related her daughter’s visit three weeks prior to her death. But it was more than just that, Nkata said. Rosie’s declaration that Teo had “gone African” and thus had rejected her husband because he was white didn’t fit in with what Barb had already said about Ross Carver’s explanation regarding the cause of their separation: that he’d loved his wife “too much.” One of them seemed to be massaging a few details: either Rosie or Ross. Both of them wanted further looking into.

  Had he started the CCTV films? Lynley wanted to know. Nkata said that he’d viewed a few hours of film, but it was a gargantuan task. Dozens of people were in and out of Teo’s building all day and into the night. It’d be helpful if he had a narrower window of time as well as some idea of what or who he was looking for.

  “Got hours more of recording to look at,” Nkata said, and since he’d not personally put eyes on anyone connected to Teo Bontempi aside from Rosie and the parents, he was working in the dark. He could isolate images of anyone entering or leaving the building alone on the day and the night when Ross Carver had said he’d found his wife, and he could view the CCTV recordings from nearby businesses on Streatham High Road. There was no ANPR camera in the vicinity, so he was in for a monumental slog.

  “I could do with some help on this, guv,” he concluded. “There’s got to be a few DCs we can call in to lend a hand, innit.”

  Lynley said he would do his best. But, he cautioned them, as the request for help had to go through Hillier, he wasn’t sure that his best would be good enough.

  What was agreed upon by all of them at the end of the meeting—during which an appearance by Dorothea Harriman informed Barbara that their first sketching session would be at the weekend, 10:00 a.m. sharp at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens—was that Barbara would return to Ross Carver for further conversation the following day, Nkata would see to producing isolated images from the night Ross Carver paid his call to Streatham, and Lynley—after an attempt to pull in some additional help—would have another word with DCS Phinney as the last person to have been in Teo Bontempi’s flat before she was hospitalised.

  And the phone number that Jade Hopwood had handed over to Lynley? Havers wanted to know. He was expecting a result on that in the morning, he told her.

  Now in front of Daidre’s flat, Lynley paused. Daidre had not responded to his message, but he decided not to take that as a sign of anything save how busy she was at London Zoo.

  He mounted the steps. He had a key but the way of wisdom suggested he not use it, so he rang the bell. Since the door to her flat was just inside the building’s entry, she generally came personally. But that wasn’t the case tonight. He heard her voice instead, and she sounded completely done in. “Can you bear me?” he said in reply to her who is it. “Or is sleep preferable?”

  “Sleep with you is more preferable still,” she replied. “Shall I buzz you in? Do you not have your key?”

  “I have it.”

  “Ah. You weren’t assuming. I like that. Come in.” She hit the buzzer to allow him to enter the building.

  With his key he let himself into the flat, and he found her looking over some paperwork in her kitchen. A bottle of red wine was open.

  “It’s very cheap plonk,” she told him. “I don’t recommend it. Your teeth and tonsils will never be the same.”

  “Luckily, I’ve no tonsils to speak of,” he said.

  “Teeth, then. Really, Tommy, it’s godawful swill. I’ll avoid the Oddbins two-pound special henceforth. There’s white in the fridge. Open that.”

  He said, “I wouldn’t think of it,” and poured himself a glass of the swill. He took a mouthful. “Good Lord, Daidre.”

  To which she replied, “Do you never take advice?”

  “One of my character flaws, of which there are literally dozens, as you’re learning.”

  “Hmm. I am indeed. Please pour it out. Pour mine out as well. Open the other.”

  “Only if you’re certain.”

  “I’m completely certain. That one cost six pounds. A real step up. How bad can it be?”

  “No doubt it’s a vintage year.” He went for the wine and joined her at the table, bringing fresh glasses with him. She said, “Have you eaten?”

  “A sandwich from Peeler’s. At least that’s where Barbara claimed it was from. Egg salad. Aside from coronation chicken, it’s the only filling that’s virtually impossible to ruin unless the entire lot’s gone bad. What are you working on?”

  She shoved the papers into the manila folders from which they’d apparently come. “Staff reviews. Not my favourite thing to do, so I’ve been procrastinating.”

  “That’s not like you.” Neither, in fact, was the terrible wine. The white was much better, though. She’d obviously been joking about the price.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’re worried about Cornwall.”

  She looked at him, obviously reluctant to go there in conversation another time. She took up her glass and drank. “I ought to eat something,” she said.

  He got to his feet. He went to the fridge. She said, “Oh God, Tommy, I didn’t mean for you to cook.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that. No doubt you’ve been warned off by Charlie Denton.”

  “Well, he has given me a word to the wise. Why does he insist upon calling you ‘his lordship,’ by the way? He manages to make me feel like someone in a Victorian costume drama but without the costume.”

  “Consider it role-playing. He’s always onstage in one way or another. I did try to break him of it, but I’ve long since given up in exchange for his cooking and dusting. His hoovering skills are rather hit-and-miss, but the man does know how to launder shirts and wield an iron.”